Good morning, RVA! It's 29 °F, but later today you can expect highs in the 60s. In fact, other than some rain on Thursday, this week’s weather looks amazing.
Water cooler
Whitney Evans at VPM has a quick report on the General Assembly’s decision to adjourn the session without agreeing on a budget. This means the Governor, at some point, will have to call the GA back for a special session so they can pass a budget, but, as of now, it’s unclear how the two chambers will reach a compromise. The Governor and Republicans in the House of Delegates want to gamble with the State’s future and defund a bunch government programs by giving out inequitable tax refunds. Democrats in the Senate want to give smaller refunds, but add in a refundable Earned Income Tax Credit—which the Commonwealth Institute says is “critical for reaching families with low incomes, who would see little to no benefit from other proposed tax policies that would primarily benefit middle-income tax filers, such as increasing the state standard deduction.” Virginia’s gotta have a budget, so something, somewhere, at some point will have to give.
Today at 1:00 PM, City Council begins a long slog of meetings starting with their second budget work session, continuing in to their informal meeting, and then heading straight on through to their regularly scheduled Monday night meeting. I don’t envy them this schedule and hope they remember to eat dinner and hydrate. For the budget curious, the agenda and meeting documents haven’t yet posted for that meeting, but I’ll make sure to get the audio up on The Boring Show as soon as I can. As for Council’s regular meeting, you can find the full agenda here which is mostly made up of Special Use Permits from Planning Commission (although, for now, the confusing laundry list of Richmond 300 amendments sits on the Regular Agenda). Make sense to me—who’s got any brainsmarts left to deal with real legislation after six hours of meetings?
Related, State Senator Jennifer McClellan has a column in the paper supporting collective bargaining for all City employees. Both of Richmond’s current collective bargaining ordinances—ORD. 2021-346, which would authorize collective bargaining for a subset of employees, and ORD. 2021-345, which would open up collective bargaining for everyone (cops included)—have been continued until Council’s May 9th meeting. We’ll see when we get there, but it feels like there’s more momentum behind the latter ordinance at the moment.
The Virginia Mercury’s Sarah Vogelsong reports that Virginia just raked in $74 million from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. From the piece: “$37.1 million of that money must go to the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, which supports local flood protection efforts, while just over $33 million must go toward low-income energy efficiency programs.” This is the same initiative that the Governor has tried his best to quit, but, so far, has found that he lacks the authority to do so. Tap through and read to the end for a great quote from Senator Lewis on power companies complaining about the burden of paying for carbon credits. Yeah, power companies, that was the entire point!
It’s Pi Day! Here are the digits of Pi I’ve got memorized: 3.141592653589793, and here are the first 100,000 digits if you need them.
This morning's longread
What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?
Remember last week’s story about the recalled school board members in San Francisco? Opening up the prestigious Lowell High School to a lottery system—instead of applications and standardized tests—played a part in that whole fracas. However, my biggest takeaway from this piece is not about magnet school admission but that every school needs, like, $2 million more dollars in their operating budget.
The problem is that special access is the opposite of what public school is supposed to be about. This puzzle has been worked at like a Rubik’s Cube for years. In 1961, during the so-called Battle of Lowell, the superintendent sought to make Lowell—then the only high school in the United States to have produced two Nobel laureates—mostly a neighborhood school, arguing that its citywide application process was bad for equality because it made other schools de-facto second rate. Opponents argued that assigning schools by neighborhood was unfair—also bad for equality—since different neighborhoods were privileged in different ways. In 2014, the school district eliminated honors tracking, teacher discretion about who can enroll in advanced courses, and middle-school Algebra 1 offerings; people were concerned that these things, too, worked against equality. Not everyone agreed.
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